31 July 2014 2:56 PM

My new e-book ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’ has now garnered a combined total of 38 favourable reviews (the great majority with five stars) on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

It is the sum of almost all my travels, Burma, North Korea, China, India, Bhutan, Africa, the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine:

You can read about Vladimir Putin’s creepy ‘Nashi’ youth movement, set up to combat any attempts at ‘People Power’ in Moscow, or how about Israel’s little-known, much-misunderstood Arab population – including Bedouin who used to fight in the Israeli Army but seldom do so now?

Here's a sample: ‘The service entrance to Hell must be something like this. On one side the two squat chimneys of a power station poke above the sandy hills. On the other a chemical factory exhales nameless filth into the hot sky. A few melancholy camels stand about waiting to be milked (or eaten), and flocks of sheep hunt for rare blades of grass.

The village, in reality a scattered, untidy archipelago of sordid, cramped hutments and tents, is crisscrossed by power-lines but has no mains electricity. Water is supplied via a feeble one-inch pipe, for several hundred people.

Ibrahim al Afash, the village headman, tells me an immensely long story of injustice, unfairness and mistreatment stretching back almost 60 years, before pausing for prayers in a Spartan mosque made of corrugated iron.

His complaint is made worse by the fact that the Bedouin Arabs, unlike their city-dwelling brothers, served willingly in the Israeli army.

They mostly do not do so any more.

The old man, who looks strikingly like Osama Bin Laden, said: 'I served in the army. They told me that if I did so I would receive all the rights given to any other Israeli. I did not receive a single one of those rights. My children saw this and drew their own conclusions.' Actually, while most Israelis concede that the Bedouin have been foolishly mistreated, it is not that simple. Here, unlike in any Arab country, a Bedouin gets a real vote in a contested election and has freedom of speech and thought. A minority of Bedouins live a great deal better in 'recognised villages', though nothing like as many as should do.

But this is the general problem of Israeli Arabs. By Arab standards they are well off.

By Israeli standards they are abominably mistreated. Some Israeli Arabs told me in private that of course they would not want to live in an Arab country, let alone in the West Bank or Gaza.

A plan to shift the border so a group of Arab towns in central Israel could be switched to Palestinian control was rejected with haggard horror by Arab leaders in Israel. They all ritually praise the Palestinian cause, but none wishes to live under its lawless rule.

One Arab journalist told me he had been asked by friends in the West Bank if he knew how to get them Israeli passports.’

Want to read on? You can.

You do not need an e-reader to read it. If you have a computer, it's available to you in a matter of seconds.. You can download it through the Kindle Cloud Reader on to any device:

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You may have thought that the furious little war between Russia and the EU had gone away, or that the area had disappeared into a timewarp or black hole, and ceased to exist.

It hasn’t.

Here is some news, as it were, from nowhere.

As a defender of Russia’s reaction to undoubted EU aggression in Ukraine, I have always been careful not to fool myself. I do not pretend that ‘my’ side is blameless, or that its activities are saintly. I also do not pretend that Russia is not directly aiding the rebels with advice, equipment , intelligence and manpower, though I await any sort of independent, verifiable proof of claims (accepted as fact by many western journalists) that large weapons are being brought across the border from Russia into Ukraine A recent UN report ( poorly covered in western media) which can be found here

denounces the secessionist pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine for kidnapping large numbers of hostages and torturing them, both disgraceful and indefensible actions. But it also criticises the Ukrainian armed forces for using heavy weapons in built-up areas (I have read elsewhere, in newspaper accounts, that they have used ‘Grad’ rockets, one of the most indiscriminate forms of artillery known to man).

I would not dream of mentioning the one evil without mentioning the other, as I believe that atrocities are committed by both sides in war, and that this is one of the main reasons to avoid war where possible. This view lies behind my condemnation of the EU’s resort to lawlessness and force, which licensed lawlessness and force by Russia and turned a diplomatic conflict into an undeclared war of great severity, whose horrors have also been visited on the innocent and uninvolved passengers and crew of MH17, and on their devastated families.

But I cannot see why the estimated 800 deaths of Ukrainian civilians in the war-ravaged East( and the 2000 wounded) should be taken any less seriously than the deaths of those aboard MH17.

In fact, there’s a disturbing moral calculation to be made here. I have said of Israel’s attack on Gaza that the civilian deaths caused by shelling and bombing populated urban areas are so predictable and so inevitable that they cannot really be described as accidental, even if they are unintended. They occupy a middle zone between deliberate killing and accidental killing. By contrast, the incompetent use of surface to air missiles (though indefensible) was actually not as likely to cause innocent death (though on this occasion it did) as the shelling or bombing of inhabited residential buildings. I am not defending any violent action here. I am just urging you to be careful, when being outraged, that you do not confine your outrage only to the death that are caused by those of whom you disapprove.

I do urge you to read the whole thing.

Here are some extracts:

‘The current intense fighting using heavy weaponry in and around population areas, has devastated towns and villages, demolishing residential buildings and killing an increasing number of their inhabitants.

More than 86,000 have fled their homes

‘After the ceasefire ended on 30 June, the [Ukrainian] Government mounted an intense offensive, recapturing territory including the main strategic base of the armed groups in the Donetsk region - the city of Slovyansk - and stating it had regained control of the Ukraine-Russian Federation border areas that had previously been under the control of the armed groups. But the price was high with at least 30 civilian deaths, many wounded, and a great deal of destruction to the recaptured villages, towns and cities. And the control was tenuous, as evidenced by the continuing attacks by armed groups that have killed and wounded soldiers and many civilians.’

‘…there has not been sufficient precaution taken to preventing death and injury to civilians’ (My emphasis)

Interestingly, the UN says 103 protestors and 20 police officers died during the ‘Maidan’ protest which eventually overthrew the lawfully elected president last winter. I really cannot see how 20 police officers could have died if the protest had been entirely peaceful, and the demonstrators unarmed.

In a fascinating aside, the UN report notes : ‘It is believed that some suspects could be involved in the security operations in the east, hence the unwillingness to carry out meaningful investigations at a sensitive time’.

This draws attention to the widespread belief, little–examined in the Western Press, that militant Ukrainian nationalists from Western Ukraine, prominent in the Kiev putsch, have now been armed and formed into units alongside the official Ukrainian armed forces, and are fighting directly against militant Russian nationalists from the East. I find it hard to believe that such individuals could have been sufficiently trained in such a short time, to be considered as disciplined troops. And I wonder who really commands them.

A search for the word ‘mongoloid’ in the UN document might also be instructive for any who think that the Ukrainian February revolution is made up entirely of Guardian-reading multiculturalists.

Some of you might also be interested in this demonstration of the new Euro-Ukraine’s commitment to political pluralism, filled as it is with paradoxes for veterans of the Cold War. The Ukrainian Justice Ministry is said to have been trying to ban the country’s Communist Party.

I have so far been unable to find out how the case went. Perhaps it is still being heard. Some of you may remember the unpleasant scenes in the Ukrainian Parliament in April when the Communist leader, Petr Symonenko, was physically seized while speaking by two deputies from the ever-charming ‘Svoboda’ party. They objected to his opinions.

Finally, I’d like to share with you the following two completely fascinating links, which I found by serendipity.

I have myself printed out both documents and spent some time reading and re-reading them. They contain some very interesting claims. I cannot vouch for their truth or accuracy, though they use many sources and don’t have the strained urgency of conspiracy literature; in fact they are written in measured, sceptical and sometimes humorous tones. The author, Steve Weissman, is an interesting veteran of America’s sixties New Left about whom I’d like to know more.

If what he says is so, then surely it is time for those who rightly draw attention to Russian involvement in the eastern separatists, to draw attention to US involvement with the Euromaidan. They might also wonder fi that involvement has since ceased, or intensified. I offer them purely as a stimulus to discussion, and would welcome especially any factual contributions which throw light on their accuracy or otherwise.

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30 July 2014 2:59 PM

Gaza continues to be the most pressing and violent issue on the planet. It has two interesting competitors for this position, in Tripoli and the area of Eastern Ukraine around Donyetsk, but most journalists simply dare not report from these places, even if they could get in, so we hear less.

And for the moment I feel I need to rebut or reply to readers’ opinions on the Gaza issue. This is frustrating, because so many of those comments are unresponsive and useless for debating purposes. Telling me I’m wrong in some general, unspecified way is useless.

Telling me that I know nothing without saying what precisely it is that I don’t know, since none of us is omniscient, and lack of knowledge is only important when it can be clearly shown and is relevant to the issue, is useless.

Telling me that other people with whom I disagree on other issues, agree with me about this, does not in any way shake my position. I do not care. If what I say is true and right, it does not matter if the same position is held by people with whom I utterly disagree. It will still be true and right. If what I say is false and wrong, it does not matter if I have the support of people I like and generally agree with. It will still be false and wrong.

Telling me there are tunnels from Gaza into Israel has nothing to do with it. This is surely no surprise. There have been scores of tunnels into Egypt from Gaza for years (I’ve seen them and written about them). They are not a secret. Hizbollah used tunnels in its northern border war against Israel. So Israel’s Army and security service (Shin Bet) would have had to be hopelessly incompetent not have been watching for such tunnels between Gaza and Israel for years. (Why, such a tunnel was shown in the BBC thriller series 'The Honourable Woman' last Thursday, though I have to say I suspected the author of this scene wasn't very hot on Israeli geography. But if a BBC scriptwriter could imagine it, then surely Shin Bet could).

I’d be amazed if they aren’t already wired for sound, and mapped.I'd be amazed if they hadn't been known about for ages. (No doubt one or to of them may have been missed but they are not an existential threat to Israel, nor is it true that they can only be found by sending soldiers into Gaza). They aren’t interrupted because any normal army would wait for his enemy to attempt to use such tunnels, and then trap him in them in the hope of catching useful prisoners for interrogation. Are we supposed to believe Israel doesn’t possess or know how to use equipment for detecting such things? How does the supposed discovery of these obvious threats justify bombing populated urban areas? Again, those who say that it does justify it are asked to explain why, precisely, as I genuinely cannot see the connection between these tunnels and killing women and children with high explosive.

Once again there’s a great gaping chasm in the logic of the defenders of this operation. Please, please explain to me, any of you, how shelling and bombing Gaza will prevent the digging of tunnels and the firing of rockets by Hamas?No doubt it will hamper these things, but only as long as it lasts. And it cannot possibly last indefinitely - so it won't stop them. Very soon after the bombardment stops, the rockets and the tunnels will begin again. Nothing has been achieved.

Just one attempt to explain the connection would be nice, instead of repeated emotional assertions that it is so, as if it were self-evident. Actually, it’s self-evidently false, in the short and medium term. The rockets have continued during the attack. And they (and the tunnels) have not been prevented by the previous attack six years ago, either. Only a re-occupation of Gaza (politically unthinkable and verging on mad) might stop them. In the long-term of course, the political damage done to Israel by this carnage is far, far greater than the military damage done to Hamas and Gaza by the Israeli armed forces. And that damage is Hamas’s aim.

After all, it really isn’t possible to claim that Hamas’s rockets have done much major damage to Israel, and the number of human casualties resulting from them is pleasingly small. This operation is simply not saving lives in significant numbers. No doubt it is terrible when you are the victim of a Hamas rocket, or when your family is the victim. But such victims are mercifully few.

Meanwhile, Israel is losing a significant number of young soldiers *only* because it has launched this attack.

Hamas certainly doesn’t mind civilians dying on its own side, as it knew would happen when it began its rocket campaign. Many Hamas militants don’t mind dying themselves. As its Al Qassam brigades have said : ‘From the Al-Qassam Brigades to the Zionist soldiers: The Al-Qassam Brigades love death more than you love life.’ This is why applying European, secular concepts of deterrence to this confrontation is so mistaken. If your enemy loves death, and he says he does, then threatening him with death isn't going to deter him.

Then there’s the utterly bizarre behaviour of certain critics of Israel, such as Mr Gribben, who use my criticism of Israel as an opportunity to argue that I don’t criticize Israel *enough* . This has its amusing side, as it wings towards me while I am fending off exasperated condemnation from fellow-Zionists who regard me as little better than a traitor for my condemnation of the attack on Gaza.

But the whole point and purpose of what I am now doing, and the reason why I did it, and the reason why I persist in it, is that it has more validity, precisely because I am not part of the powerful well-financed choir for whom every Israeli action is wrong under all circumstances. Likewise I am not part of the other choir, nearly as well-financed, for whom nothing Israel does is ever wrong.

And I was careful to set out my logic for my reluctant but unshakeable acceptance of the case for a Jewish state in control of its own borders and immigration, as the last resort for Jews fleeing the murderous persecution which appears to be the unavoidable, unpredictable but effectively permanent threat under which they live. I have not got myself into any kind of tangle, as alleged, in explaining why Israel must have its specifically Jewish character, and in explaining why this is not racial bigotry, but a defence against it.

It is a necessary response to the undeniable and ineradicable existence (even in the most civilized parts of the world) of a potentially murderous Judophobia. I really do not know how to explain this more clearly. I must ask those who glibly reject the idea of a Jewish state as racist to imagine yourself as the reluctant star of the following personal melodrama:

You are living in happy but modest prosperity in, say, Frankfurt-am-Main in 1932, as a normal German Protestant. Not long before the National Socialists come to power, documents are uncovered (perhaps unearthed by accident, perhaps by a business or professional rival. Who knows? These things happen) which show that you have Jewish ancestry previously unknown to you. You have not changed. Your beliefs, culture, everything about you, remain the same. But a file containing incontrovertible facts about your ancestry has, though you do not realise it yet, condemned you to death.

Being well-informed and prescient, and having studied the speeches of Herr Hitler and his colleagues, and read their books, you immediately seek to emigrate. Nobody will take you. SO Sorry. Soon, the problem grows more serious. Hitler comes to power. The Nuremberg laws are promulgated. You continue to seek emigration as the persecution intensifies and the world darkens. But there is nowhere to go, not even the British colony of Palestine , officially ‘A National Home for the Jews’, where tight limits have now been placed (by the British government) on Jewish immigration. You know the end of this story. You and your family will be first starved and made miserable, then taken away and murdered, by the state, because an official document says you are a Jew. As far as I am concerned, if you do not actively wish that end, for yourself or anyone else, then you must see the sense in there being a Jewish state which will take people in your position, unconditionally.

By the way, it needs to be stressed again and again especially when people complain that the West Bank 'settlements', in reality towns, are exclusively Jewish, that Israel itself is not exclusively Jewish, but contains a large number of Arab citizens, about whose complicated status I have written a great deal. There are places where they live alongside their Jewish fellow-citizens, but usually in circumstances of urban anonymity (much as happens with Black and White Americans in the still-informally-segregated USA).

Israel's Arabs are better off by a mile than their neighbours living under Arab Muslim rule - though you won't often get them to say so publicly - both in material terms and legal and constitutional terms. But those who attack Israel for being an 'apartheid' or 'racist' state really do need to take a look at the treatment of Jews In the Arab and Muslim world, when they are permitted to live there at all, and of Christians. There is no possible excuse for this. Talk about mote and beam. Yet Israel's critics, voluble on Israel's alleged bigotry, are silent about this.

My point is quite simple. I recognise and condemn the undeniable wrongdoing involved in the establishment of Israel. I recognise the diplomatic cynicism involved in its foundation. I condemn terrorist actions whoever does them, rather more consistently than most people do. I refuse to pretend that wrong actions were right. But I point out that no nation, old or new, is free from dispossession, blood and pain in its foundation, and so it will always be. So, to condemn Israel into non-existence for this reason is absurd. Rather than using this past grief as an excuse to destroy, and to tear up a settled existing society, we should use it as a guide to minimising suffering in the future.

I’d also like to answer one particular charge made against me by people who imagine they are helping Israel by defending this idiotic attack.

I am told ‘You are playing into the hands of the anti-Israel bigots’

I reply *** ‘In what way?

Those bigots are certainly glad of this opportunity to portray Israel falsely as a bullying Goliath in a region where it is in fact a tiny enclave, surrounded by tens of millions of Arabs whose governments and peoples (often subject to unceasing official propaganda against Israel from childhood onwards) are hostile to its very existence, and unwilling to recognize that existence at all. One might also point out that the Arab and Muslim world is enormously rich, thanks to oil, and very well-armed (especially in the case of Saudi Arabia and Egypt), having been helped in this way by enormous financial and technical aid from the USA. There is even an Islamic bomb, in Pakistan. There may well soon be others, though I personally suspect that Saudi Arabia is more likely to go nuclear than Iran.

I condemn Arab brutality to Arabs, as well as Israeli brutality to Arabs. Readers of my column and blog, for instance, will have known for many years of the Assad government’s 1982 attack on Hama, at least as brutal as anything now taking place in Gaza, and in my view much more so. The oldest reference to this in my writing that I can find goes back 12 years , to 2002, long before Assad-bashing became fashionable, as I pointed out in this posting:

I also condemn Western brutality to Arabs, as I did during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which I (again unfashionably) opposed from the start. The fashionable people all found that they opposed it later after it was obvious even to them that it was (like the Israeli attack on Gaza) a stupid and self-damaging disaster. At the time I got letters telling me I was a ‘traitor’.

As I wrote from Cairo in April 2003: ‘The elderly man in the Al Borsa coffee shop, a pleasant, friendly, airy place near the majestic Hassan mosque in the vast, dusty wilderness of southern Cairo, asked me: 'Are you proud to be British right now?' I could not honestly tell him that I was. For him and almost everyone in the Arab world, Britain is now one of the countries killing innocents in Iraq, in what they all see as a crude colonial venture that will do no good to anybody.

‘While our TV stations show the guns firing and the missiles being launched, the ones here concentrate far more on what happens when the shells strike and the missiles land. Footage of dead and dismembered babies, too horrible for us to see, is ruthlessly screened. Nobody much cares that such things are accidental or unintended and they do not believe our claims to be liberators.

‘Fury, bitterness, resentment, impotence, wounded pride and trampled dignity all boil together in the minds of Arabs. And when they see bomb damage and casualties in Arab towns, they see landscapes, streets and houses almost identical to the ones they live in. They see people who look and speak and think and worship and eat precisely as they do, and hope for and fear the same things. They can understand the screams of the mourning women.’

I added; ‘All in all, it is amazing that here I have encountered nothing but politeness, consideration and generosity - with one alarming exception that I will come to later. Each person I have spoken to has been utterly courteous, but frantic to press on me that the war is a serious mistake which will damage Britain in their eyes for decades to come.

'If those in the British newspaper industry who noisily and militantly support the war looked at their counterparts in the Egyptian Press, they would see their own methods used to achieve exactly the opposite effect. Whole pages are given over to pictures of dead and wounded children, wrecked homes, weeping parents. They have faces, unlike the British and American soldiers, who appear as distant, dehumanised figures in helmets and goggles.

The headlines in the Cairo papers say: 'Horrible massacres of civilians', 'Mosques, holy shrines and hospitals bombed'. Yet another picture of blood-encrusted infant bodies carries the caption: 'Victims of brutal aggression as a result of the random bombing of civilians'. Another says: 'Anglo-American frenzy cost this child his eyesight'.

'Every page of war coverage in Al Akhbar bears the words: 'A war against international law'. A columnist sneers that the slogan of the Coalition forces is: 'Please allow me to kill you so that I can liberate you'.

'It would be a good deal easier to take if there was not so much truth behind it.’

Likewise, I have condemned the horrors of Arab terror against Israel, such as this from my column in April 2002 : ‘In Israel, it seems, we must treat the world's goriest terror organisation as the equal of an elected, lawful government. In Israel we do not hunt down terror. There, we talk to terror and feed it sweeties.

‘What is wrong with my trade? Why do so many reporters, all doubtless supporters of the battle against Osama Bin Laden, fall for the grotesque propaganda of the Palestinian terrorists?

‘Did you know that the Muslim gunmen who cynically hid in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem shot the locks off the door to get in? Did you know that they were offered food, medical supplies and a doctor by the Israeli Army? Did you know that Arab Christians in the area are persecuted by Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation but are, of course, too scared to say so … And did you know that on March 17, a Palestinian gunman deliberately fired into a crowd of children leaving a school in an Israeli town, killing a girl aged 17 and injuring others?

‘If you didn't know any of these things, ask yourself why. The reporting of the Middle East is a disgrace. The bias and ignorance of many of those who do it is appalling. They should be ashamed of themselves.’

The fact that I, and the anti-Israel bigots, both tell the truth about what is now happening in Gaza does not make me an anti-Israel bigot. At least, if it does, I would love to know how. As it happens, I also attacked Israel’s last assault on Gaza, which wasn’t as sustained as the present one. Yet (to my surprise at the time) I did not get much criticism. I don’t know why.

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28 July 2014 4:10 PM

I’ll devote this post to general points about Gaza, many of them arising from letters I’ve received or points made here. First of all I’ll just dispose of a couple of comments that stand out.

John Edwards writes ‘When discussing Ukraine nobody talks about "the Slavs of the region" but Peter Hitchens still insists on referring to the Palestinians as "the Arabs of the region". Why are Palestinians, uniquely, denied their national identity and a link with a geographical place? Perhaps because someone else wants their land.’

***Even I, who argue that Ukraine does not properly exist as a sovereign nation, readily recognize that there is a Ukrainian language and culture . The trouble is,and I thought we had got past this by now, is that neither language nor culture is universal among the people in the current version of ‘Ukraine’, which has simply inherited the largely meaningless borders of Stalin’s and Khrushchev’s Ukrainian SSR (Soviet Socialist Republic). Many of the citizens of Ukraine, especially in the East, are to all intents and purposes Russian. Many are mixed, speak both languages and have family which is Ukrainian and family which is Russian. The only part of the country which is pretty much wholly Ukrainian is the far West, much of which used to be part of Austria Hungary and then of pre-1939 Poland.

The idea of a ‘Palestinian’ nationality is a propaganda invention of the 1960s and 1970s, which (amongst other things) cast Israel as a dominant majority overpowering an Arab minority. Until then, Israel had been seen (to its great propaganda advantage) as a tiny Jewish state surrounded by hundreds of millions of mainly Muslim, mainly Arab enemies.

But by separating the local Arabs into a ‘Palestinian’ nationality, this was overcome. David became Goliath and Goliath apparently shrank to become David. Leaving aside the lack of evidence of the use of the term ‘Palestinian’ by the Arabs themselves before about 1970, I have not heard of any notable distinction between the culture and language of Arabs in the West Bank and of the non-Bedouin Arabs in Jordan, both of whom are descendants of inhabitants of the original ‘Palestine’ mandate. On the other hand, I think the Arabs of Gaza probably have more in common, cuturally, with their Egyptian neighbours than they do with the Arabs of the West bank.

’Jim New’ writes : ‘Palestine was never in any shape, form or stretch of the imagination, a British Colony’

***This is an extraordinary statement. I would love to hear more of his justification for it. It is true that the official designation was a ‘Mandate’, but it had all the trappings and appurtenances of a colony and was governed as such by the Colonial Office. My father, a naval officer, was rather surprised, in 1936, to find himself in Haifa putting down Arab riots, when he was supposed to be patrolling the South Atlantic aboard HMS Ajax. If Mr ‘New’ had told him that Mandate Palestine wasn’t a colony in any shape, form or stretch of the imagination, I rather think my father would have laughed.

Anyway, now we’ve got past that, and I’ve duly infuriated any pro-Arab fanatics who read this blog, I must return to infuriating the pro-Israel fanatics. Oddly enough, they didn’t pay much attention to my last essay on this problem, back in December 2008. The internal politics of Israel were slightly different, but otherwise it was more or less exactly the same controversy.

Its central point could have been written today : ‘ Even though all the usual suspects, the Judophobes, the diplomats, the gullible liberals, say that what Israel is doing now in Gaza is wrong, it really is wrong.

My position, as a strong supporter of Israel in general, is that Israel's action is wrong morally and gravely mistaken politically. Attacks from the air always kill innocents. It is no good pleading that you regret such deaths, when you knew perfectly well that your actions were bound to cause them. This was equally true of our own adventures in Iraq and Serbia, and is true of American bombing in Afghanistan. Israel's moral position is seriously weakened by the deaths of these innocents, and also by the flanneling and evasion of its spokesmen over this.’

Now let me turn to a comment from ‘John Main’ , who asks : ‘The fate of Israel will not be decided in people’s minds by people like us watching TV. We watch TV all the time, we disagree with much that we see, but we are powerless to decide anything. Why should the fate of Israel be an exception to that rule?’

***The answer is actually very simple. Israel has from its beginnings depended on powerful sponsors in democtratic countries who are very much influenced by what people watch on TV, and what they make of it.

The original ‘National Home for the Jews’, (not a state as such) in Mandate or Colonial Palestine, existed under increasingly reluctant but actual British sponsorship, upheld and sustained by British imperial power. Arthur Balfour’s decision to make the declaration had been made at a very bad moment in the First World War, where it was thought that it would weaken Germany and Austro-Hungary (similar belies led to the Allies’ endorsement of Czechoslovak independence).

When Britain began to fear that Arab resistance to Jewish immigration threatened her standing among the Arabs in the entire Middle East, British support for the ‘National Home’ cooled very fast . I personally don’t think it misleading to say that many British officials in the 1920s and 1930 worked quite actively to encourage Arab opposition to the National Home. The (British) appointment of the committed anti-Zionist Haj Amin al Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, over the heads of the local Arab hierarchy, in 1921, might have been designed to undermine Balfour.

When Britain eventually pulled out of the Twice-Promised land in 1948, leaving behind an impossible contradictory mess caused by its own policies, it was only Harry Truman’s strong support for Israel which allowed its successful creation as a state (plus the temporary willingness of Czechoslovakia to provide arms). Without those sponsors, Israel would not have survived , and without American sponsorship it would not have survived the long and difficult period of economic hardship and constant danger which then began.

The importance of the sponsorship is not just military and economic, though of course these things matter hugely.

Israel’s very nature runs against much of the dogma of the modern world. Enemies of Israel describe it as a ‘racist’ state, an extraordinary and almost total inversion of the truth, which si that it is *A state born out of the racialism of others*.

To my amazement, there are still people in this world who think that being Jewish is about religion, a matter of individual choice like Baptism or Unitarianism, and even people who think that Judophobia arises out of religious quarrels.

The people who hate Jews ( and there is no reasoning with such people, who are in often in all other respects perfectly rational, and even charming or humorous, but in this matter quite beyond the edge of sanity) couldn’t care less about religion. It’s Jews they don’t like, and that’s that. Many Jews are atheists, or just non-religious. Neither the Tsarist Black Hundreds, nor Hitler, nor Vichy France, could have cared less about what people believed. It was their bloodlines they wanted to check on, not their religious opinions.

The single most blatant example of this will always be the late Edith Stein, a prominent Roman Catholic theologian and Carmelite nun, German born, who was vindictively dragged from her convent in the Netherlands in 1941, and hauled off to Auschwitz to be murdered, because she had Jewish blood. I do hope this is clear.

It is because people were prepared to do things like that, on logic of that kind, that Israel was founded – to be a place where people could go when other people wanted to kill them because of their blood.

So to say it is a racist state is not just a slander. It is the opposite of the truth. But, given the general unwillingness of the civilized liberal democracies to take in more than a very few rich prominent Jews (and a small number of children, cruelly separated from their doomed parents, on the famous Kindertransport), Israel was determined that it should be able to hold its doors open for the foreseeable future to all people in that position.

The scheme, though not exactly utopian, was certainly idealist, and had all the ruthlessness of idealism. We now know, mainly thanks to Israeli historians who refused to allow the truth to be buried any longer, that the birth of Israel was achieved at the expense of many thousands of innocent Arabs, driven from their homes.

This is horrible, but, as I’ve said before, the USA, Australia, the Caribbean, and many other modern countries arose out of similar brutal drivings out of existing populations. This sort of thing is not unique even in the 20th century, which saw similar horrors (though much greater in scale) in the ‘exchange of populations’ between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s, and in Eastern Europe and India during the Potsdam deportations and the Partition, in 1947 and 1948. My point here is that the other comparable actions are forgotten and nobody seeks to reopen them, and one must ask those who wish to reopen the 1948 expulsions why they ( and the UN) concentrate on these, and these alone – and why they don’t take the view generally held in Germany, Poland, the Czech and Slovak lands, East Prussia, India and Pakistan, that no good purpose would be served by reopening such a wound.

But in these complex and unlovely origins lies the increasingly widespread claim that Israel, like South Africa , is an ‘apartheid state’ and so not deserving of UN or US sponsorship. This is not confined to small and sordid corners. The former American President, the much-admired Jimmy Carter, has used the word ‘apartheid’ to describe Israeli action in the occupied West Bank.

This is not as bad as those who suggest that Israel’s actions are comparable with those of the Nazis. But it is surprising how powerfully this obviously false, rather dangerous and hysterical claim (There is not the slightest evidence that Israel has any sort of exterminationist policy towards non-Jews. I put this refutation as mildly as I possibly can) gains acceptance in the minds of those who have decided that Israel is an evil racial state.

Is probably more damaging, because it has gained acceptance well outside the ranks of the swivel-eyed and the hopelessly bigoted.

And it is because of its power and implications that Israel’s current policy in Gaza is so very dangerous.

I’ll come to that, but first I must deal with a claim repeatedly made by defenders of Israel’s attack on Gaza.

It is that in some way shelling and bombing Gaza ‘protects’ Israel from Hamas rockets.

But it simply doesn’t. Days of shelling have not stopped the rockets in the short term. Weeks of shelling will not stop them in the long term. Just as the 2008 shelling failed to stop the 2014 rocket attack, the 2014 shelling will not stop the next rocket attack from Gaza in – let me guess – 2017? Hamas will actually have gained both recruits and international support as a result of this week’s events, when it was losing both before them, and the Gaza Strip is not, and never will be so closed off that the making of rockets will be impossible.

I might also mention that Hamas’s rockets are inaccurate, carry small warheads (not to mention the fact that Israel has a seemingly effective anti-missile shield which deals with many of the Hamas rockets before they can hit their targets) and have, I’m glad to say, done remarkably little damage and killed and injured remarkably few people despite the length and extent of the bombardment. This is no comfort, I know, to those who have suffered – but on the other hand, there is absolutely no evidence that Israel’s attack on Gaza has prevented a single Hamas rocket from flying, or will do so in the future. To characterize this attack as defensive is just misleading.

I really don’t see why it’s so shocking to suggest that Israel would have done better to endure this attack. It’s often wiser not to be provoked. Franklin Roosevelt wouldn’t allow himself to be provoked by German attacks on US Navy ships (especially the Reuben James) during the undeclared convoy war from 1939 to 1941. Was he weak or wrong? I’m sure there are other instances of the strong not allowing themselves to be provoked by the weak into doing what the weak wanted them to do.

But the propaganda effect on Israel’s public standing, resulting from the scenes of civilian death in Gaza, is enormous and longstanding.

Readers here will know that I do not accept excuses from anybody for the killing of innocent civilians in bombing and shelling of populated areas. Only three generations ago such behaviour would rightly have been viewed with utter horror. Gazans I spoke to directly (who live in what is virtually a police state) were privately horrified when Hamas set up missile sites near their homes, but dared not protest. We cannot blame them, or view their death, injury and ruin as just punishment for their failure to protest – because in the same circumstances we too would not dare to protest.

But this is, as Talleyrand once said in another context, not just a crime. It is a mistake. Israel, back in 1967, had a huge credit balance in the propaganda war, not least in Europe where it has now almost wholly lost it. Bit by bit, it has let that drain away, relying increasingly on the reeking tube and iron shard of unrestrained force, its supporters given to macho statements about how they don’t care if no-one likes them, they will defend themselves. Support remains strong -for now -in the USA - but for how long can this endure unless Israel gets a *lot*more clever?

In modern diplomacy, small and unpopular countries have to have enough friends simply to stay alive.

As I say above, I absolutely reject the claimed parallel between Israel and apartheid South Africa.

But others do not. And their realistic and achievable aim (an aim, alas, much advanced by Israel’s crass flailing in the past two weeks) is to isolate Israel, diplomatically, economically and culturally, as South Africa was isolated, until all the weapons and tanks in the world cannot save it from the pressure form within and without, and from signing itself into non-existence through acceptance of a ‘right of return’ or a ‘one-state solution’, which would end the Jewish state for good. This is a very real danger. The USA is changing very fast, and it is time Israel's overconfident supporters understood just how fast.

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27 July 2014 3:35 PM

I gave this interview to Fubar Radio on Saturday. It gives me a largely-uninterrupted opportunity to explain my position on the Ukraine crisis. I suppose I'll just have to put up with their inability to spell my name.

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Israel exists only because quite a lot of people hate Jews for being Jews, and sometimes that hate turns into murder.

It is a place where Jews can go when other people want to kill them for being what they are, not for what they do, and when nobody else will take them in.

But it also exists because we in Britain set up a Jewish ‘national home’ in what was then our colony of Palestine, though we spent the next 30 years trying to go back on our word.

And it also exists because when we were too poor to hang on to our empire and quit Palestine in 1948 – leaving it in bloody, unfinished disarray – the USA backed the Jewishstate that emerged from the mess.

It may all have been a terrible mistake. I’m not sure what choice there was back then. But it is there, like many other lingering injustices done in the 1940s, in India and centralEurope, and it seems to me that wise and civilised people should try to accept it and make it work.

The alternative is endless blood and screams, stretching for miles and for years.

I made up my mind some years back, after many visits to the region, very much including the West Bank and Gaza, that the only honest position a British person could take was absolute defence of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. It must be that, or it cannot serve its grim ultimate purpose as a refuge against hate. And that once that is accepted, everything possible must be done to improve the position of the Arabs in the region.

It’s not always easy. Israel’s government and army have done and still do many wicked and stupid things. Its small elite is not really up to the huge responsibilities it faces. But I’m not budging.And it is from that position that I say Israel’s attack on Gaza is idiotic, wrong and probably fatal to the future of the state its leaders claim to be defending.

Hamas, still clinging to its increasingly unpopular rule in Gaza, is overjoyed by Israel’s moronic, babyish response. It is all they dreamed of.

The world’s TV screens are full of pictures of dead and wounded women and children, weeping, gore and rubble – exactly what Hamas hoped to provoke.

Israel may bray that it did not intend to do this. I’m sure it didn’t. But if you shell and bomb a confined space such as Gaza, it will happen, and shame on you if you pretend that it’s not your fault when it does.

It is ludicrous to claim that this action, which makes future conflict certain, protects Israel in any way.

The fate of Israel will be decided in people’s minds, in countries like ours, and on TV screens, not by bullets and high explosive. Each episode of this kind makes that future more doubtful.

It is an illusion that a violent toughness is the only answer to threats. The really strong and brave man knows when to hold back.

Just as it would have been more sensible to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza when they captured them in 1967, it would have been far, far better to let the Hamas rockets fall, to shelter from them and to let the world see how much better Israel is than its aggressive despotic neighbours.

But the chance was missed, and it may, alas, have been missed for ever.

Having lived all my life in a world that was largely sensible and reasonable, I sense that the bad times are on the way back.

Peaches: poisoned by pious rubbish

Did you help Peaches Geldof to die? Quite possibly. Everyone who lazily accepts the conventional wisdom about drugs played a part in this and many other similar tragedies.

Many years ago, we decided to treat heroin abuse as an illness. We wouldn’t punish those who did it. Instead, we ‘treated’ them, in many cases by mugging taxpayers to give them free drugs.

Most people still agree on the idea that the drug user is a victim. The main problem with it is that it’s not true. The next problem is that it makes it much easier for people to become drug abusers.

I don’t believe in ‘addiction’, but I’ll leave that for another time. Even if I did, it would only strengthen my point. If it really is true that once you start taking heroin you can never stop again until you die, shouldn’t we be devoting huge efforts to making sure nobody ever starts?

And wouldn’t a severe deterrent law, one which (for a change) we actually enforced, be the best way of doing that? A few examples work wonders in changing people’s behaviour, as we found when the breathalyser and seat-belts came in.

If we’d very publicly locked up a few famous heroin abusers in the 1960s and 1970s, there’d be many fewer of them – famous or obscure – now. Because we didn’t, there are plenty more of these cases to come, plenty more ruined lives, plenty more orphans and plentymore pious rubbish.

So what’s boosted Ukraine’s army? Yoga?

I'm pleased to see that the wild, simple-minded anti-Russian hysteria of last weekend has cooled a bit, as the complicated truth has emerged and the intelligence briefings have calmed down.

I trust our Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, has had a moment to lie down in a darkened room with a cold compress, reconsidering his outburst about ‘state-sponsored terror’. He’s probably found out by now that his colleagues have scrapped or sacked most of our Armed Forces, making his belligerence look funny to anyone in the know.

By the way, I am quite sure that Russia has been helping the rebels in Ukraine. It’s obvious.

But it’s also fairly obvious that Ukraine’s revolutionary government, which came to power in an EU and American-backed mob putsch in February, is getting help too.

Who from? Perhaps they’re doing yoga or taking vitamin pills, but your guess is as good as mine.

A few months ago, they were a decrepit shambles. Now they’re fighting and winning a violent battle to regain Luhansk and Donetsk. And it is very violent. Credible sources (local doctors) believe that 250 civilians have been killed and 850 wounded in Luhansk alone, during June and July.

Much of this is the result of the shelling and bombing of populated areas (just like Gaza) by ‘our’ side.

If you have any moral outrage left over after last week, you might want to expend it on that fact.

***

What I don’t understand is why it is supposed to be good for British politicians to humble themselves in the White House before whoever happens to be President of that foreign and not specially friendly country.

I suspect that the first party leader to say he doesn’t want such a visit will win the hearts and minds of the British people.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

NB, owing to a technical error, comments were closed on this item until about 2.20 pm. The error has now been corrected.

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26 July 2014 5:36 PM

'...One of the most articulate and intelligent people I met in Iran was a young schoolteacher, the mother of a young child. It was clear that her relationship with her husband was that of an equal. Yet as we discussed propaganda in the classroom, I was greatly struck by her extraordinary, medieval, night-black robes, so intensely sombre that they darkened the well-lit room in which we sat and so emphatically, ferociously modest that they represented an unspoken, passionate argument against secular modernity and all its works.

Much less persuasive or sympathetic was the bearded, taciturn man in an Esfahan ironmonger’s shop close to that lovely city’s tourist arcades of carpets, beaten copper, and spices. This man’s wares were not so picturesque. Displayed on his shelves were the sharp, grey zanjeer chains employed by Shia zealots to lash themselves bloody during the fierce, miserable festival of Ashura. This marks the great defeat of Shia arms at Kerbala more than 1,300 years ago. Also on display were other, heavier chains with an equally disturbing but secular purpose. These are used as weapons and threats by the Basiji, a sort of pro-government Islamic militia that is deployed to intimidate any public expression of opposition, much as similar “people’s militias” were used by Warsaw Pact states to ensure the Communist Party’s rule went unchallenged.

I was also unpleasantly surprised, during an evening stroll through Mashhad, to encounter a shop entirely devoted to the sale of chadors, the enveloping black shroud favoured by the mullahs. Especially disagreeable were the tiny child-sized models ranged in the window. I had just been marvelling at the near-European normality of the surrounding district, its busy cinema with its mixed clientele, its wedding shops and bookstores, its bold, regulation-defying young women. And here was this reminder of how this place remains anything but normal in many important ways.

Even less normal is the holy city of Qom, headquarters of the ayatollahs, for many years the home of Khomeini himself. I was urged by some Iranians not to go there. “It is Arabia in the middle of Persia,” warned a bookseller in Esfahan who had just shown me some rather rude but very beautiful prints featuring wine and young women not wearing chadors. Others just said that a sort of darkness seemed to hang over it. And yet, like so much of Iran, it was paradoxical.

I went to Qom by way of the strange shrine of Jamkaran, especially favoured by President Ahmadinejad, where the fabled Hidden Imam is widely believed to be most likely to reappear. It is a rather desperate, dusty, and angry place, beloved by the very poor and the very fervent, who slog to it on foot for many miles. But in Iran such things are part of life in a way almost forgotten in the American and European world. The worldly and the otherworldly, the commercial and the spiritual, mingle happily and unselfconsciously. The modern highway that leads from Tehran to Qom is a 21st-century construction in a partly medieval land. It has electronic speed-check cameras every few miles, alternating with official signboards bearing quotations from the Koran. Devout drivers recite them to keep awake on long night journeys. Imagine I-95, or the M4, overhung with signs proclaiming, “I am the way, the truth and the life” interspersed with advertisements for Howard Johnson’s or MacDonalds.

At dusk, the half-built mosque of Jamkaran glows greenish, like a cooling spaceship on the jagged Martian landscape of the region. But beside it sparkles a garish row of shops selling the local sweetmeat, a sugary brittle made of pistachio nuts, without which no pilgrimage is complete. Picture Washington National Cathedral or Westminster Abbey surrounded by stalls selling cotton candy, illuminated in primary colours, and nobody at all surprised or concerned, and you may get some impression of the effect.

The outer suburbs of Qom, likewise, are anything but holy in appearance. Hardware stores, candy outlets, and religious emporia selling the Koran at 40-percent reductions crowd the busy streets. There are parking lots the size of modest counties for pilgrim cars and coaches. Over it all towers the floodlit gold dome of another great Shia shrine, with an entire wall of mirrored glass, shining into the warm, windy night and the green flag of militant Islam floating above. Little by little, the visitor becomes aware of the enormous number of mullahs, all bearded, all in coffee-coloured robes and white turbans. There are mullahs climbing off buses with briefcases, mullahs driving cars, mullahs on motorbikes, rigidly clutching the handlebars…’

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25 July 2014 5:15 PM

I make some brief appearances in this ITV 'Tonight' programme ‘Is Britain Christian?’, broadcast on Thursday 24th July at 7.30, the usual tiny snippets out of a lengthy conversation, which of course I knew to expect. Some interesting reflections on Church schools whose pupils are predominantly Muslim, and Zoe Williams her usual ineffable self on how religious people mustn’t ‘impose’ their views on the non-religious (as if secularists never impose their beliefs on the religious). There’s also some footage from one of the new Godless assemblies, but their enthusiasts are not asked very much about what idea they actually wish to communicate. The principal interviewee is a Lancaster sociology professor, Linda Woodhead (alongside whom I debated the subject last year, though more as loosely-linked allies than close comrades). No surprise there. Christianity is now a sociological or even anthropological peculiarity. Actual adherents, especially conservative ones such as me, are exhibits rather than participants.

I’d also draw attention to the very muted coverage of the resignation of Ukraine’s Prime Minister, surely a rather significant event just now, partly because he has lost the support of the unpleasant ‘Svoboda’ party, discussed here in the past.

And to a BBC reporter’s use of the phrase ‘February Revolution’ to describe the overthrow of the legitimate Ukrainian Government earlier this year (chapter and verse to come later).

And to what seems to me (this could be a fault in my search skills, I’d be grateful for any other sightings) extraordinary paucity of coverage in British media of the US Intelligence briefing which I discussed at length here, and whose existence was revealed to Radio 4 listeners by BBC reporter Aleem Maqbool:

‘Mr Antonov [Russian Deputy Defence Minister] said US intelligence experts had claimed they could "prove the guilt of the [pro–Russian] militia and almost Russia itself" and were in possession of technical data and satellite photographs to back up their accusation.

‘"So where is this evidence?" he asked on the Rossiya–24 channel. "Why is it not presented to the public? Is it, if I may say so, still being finished off?" Barack Obama, the US president, said earlier this week that flight MH17 was brought down by a surface–to–air missile that was fired from "territory that is controlled by Russian separatists". Samantha Powers, the US ambassador to the UN, went further, adding "we cannot rule out technical assistance from Russian personnel in operating the systems".

‘US intelligence officials appeared to backtrack somewhat later, saying they had no definitive evidence about who exactly fired the missile, or about Russian involvement. However, the officials said it was implausible that Ukrainian forces fired the missile, and that they still believed that separatists were likely to blame.’

(So do I. I have from the start. I didn't need satellite pictures or intercepts to work it out, either).

I'd just add one small thing. I have now contacted the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) at their Vienna HQ, and tracked down the civilian figures for casualties in the UKraine conflict, which have not had much play in Western media, though RT and othrs have of course made much of them.

They are not, I stress, OSCE figures. Their report here makes it plain that this is what they heard from credible sources in Lugansk

They cannot be verified (very little can be verified, in war zones). But here is an extract (SMM is 'Special Monitoring Mission') :

'The situation in parts of Luhansk and Donetsk regions remained tense with on-going fighting around the city of Luhansk. While patrolling the city centre of Luhansk, close to the occupied building of the Regional Administration, the SMM heard the sound of a shell hitting a garage, located about 200 metres away. Within two minutes the SMM arrived at the scene and found one man killed lying on the pavement; the garage and a car were totally demolished.

'On 17 July, the SMM met with four members of Luhansk emergency first aid brigade. They reported that the day before, the first aid team responded to a call after firing in Luhansk had taken place, but before they were even able to see the patients, firing resumed and they had to run to a basement. One paramedic was injured by shrapnel. The doctors said that in June and July alone there were 250 killed and 850 wounded in the Luhansk region. (my emphasis, PH) The doctors also informed that on 16 July alone three persons were killed and 30 were wounded in Luhansk city. This last number does not include civilians killed in close vicinity of combat zones outside of the city and causalities among combatants. They also claimed that increasingly more people were being killed by booby traps and mines.'

This seems to me to be quite serious. I think we should hear more about it, especially as it results from a surprisingly vigorous assault on the rebels by a newly-invigorated Ukrainian Army, which a few months ago was decrepit and demoralized. Whatever has happened? have they taken up Pilates yoga, or is it vitamin pills or the Alexander technique? Or is it possible, whisper it not, that they (like the rebels) are getting outside help?

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24 July 2014 4:54 PM

'…Travel a few hundred miles further east, though, passing through the latest version of Poland, and you come to the curious, accidental country of Belarus, which might have been invented for educational purposes.

Such a place never existed before and probably will not for much longer. It is independent of Russia only as an unintended side-effect of the break-up of the USSR at the end of the Gorbachev era. They broke it off and forgot to stick it back on again.

Its independence from Moscow lacks conviction. There is in reality no proper border with Russia, whose citizens can slip in and out at will. But there is certainly still a border with ‘The West’, a phrase that still means something here.

But there is certainly still a border with “The West,” a phrase that still means something here.

And what a border it is. After nearly a thousand miles of passport-free travel, from the English Channel to Warsaw, the voyager is abruptly required to produce his documents, visa and all, properly stamped, just as in the old days. Trains cannot even cross without having their wheels removed, for long ago the Russian empire adopted a wider gauge to prevent a rail-borne invasion.

Here at Brest on the River Bug—travellers who wish to rest overnight may stay in the Hotel Bug—stands the final frontier of the European Union, an abrupt and total stop to that strange, postmodern empire of deliberately forgotten history, bureaucracy, and subsidy. The EU may dream of one day incorporating Ukraine and even Turkey. But Belarus? I don’t think so. The place is too troublesome and unpredictable. An inhabitant of Brest—provided he was on nobody’s death list and was generally lucky—might have lived in five different countries in one century without so much as moving house.

In this disputed city, just by the Polish frontier, are the ruins of the mighty fortress of Brest Litovsk, built by the Tsars, acquired by Pilsudski’s Poland in 1921, taken back by Stalin in his pact with Hitler in 1939, conquered by Hitler in 1941, retaken by Stalin in 1944, the property of an independent Belarus since 1991, and who knows what next?

Brest provided the backdrop to a nightmare joint victory parade by the Red Army and Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the autumn of 1940. Pictures still exist of this queasy event, but there is no sign of any cheering crowd.

Within the smashed walls of its citadel lies the shell of the old White Palace, scene of the “forgotten peace” of Brest Litovsk, the very spot where a petulant Leon Trotsky stormed away from the table as Bolshevik-ruled Russia was humiliated and dismembered by the Kaiser’s ungrateful Germany. An almost identical humiliation, driving Russia back to eerily similar borders, was imposed on Moscow by an equally ungrateful Washington after Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin ended the Cold War.

As for Belarus itself, a flat and defenceless territory on the main invasion route between Paris and Moscow, its fertile soil is watered with blood and full of bones—Russian, Polish, French, German, and, of course, Jewish. No wonder its people are keen on all the tranquillity they can get. Currently, they get quite a lot.

This is thanks to the extraordinary Alexander Lukashenko, an inexcusable and increasingly unbalanced tyrant whose enemies often disappear mysteriously, if they are not beaten up by his police or flung into his prisons after travesties of trials…’

Want to read on? You can - by reading my new e-book ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’ , which now has 21 favourable customer reviews on amazon.co.uk (20 of them five-star, one four-star) and six on amazon.com (all five stars).

You do not need an e-reader to read it. If you have a computer, it's available. You can download it through the Kindle Cloud Reader on to any device: